Twitter begins crowd-sourced translations

Recently I became aware of Twitter’s new translation initiative that enlists the help of its user base. I think it’s a unique and possibly worthwhile gamble. After all, the translations are free, and twitter pays it users by giving them a …. “special badge on their public Twitter page displaying their status as an official Twitter translator.”

The idea is simple enough. An invited twitterer/translator logs into their site. Having been identified as a translator, the user sees additional buttons on their twitter web UI…buttons that allow you to translate the page labels and text. Cool.

Twitter wants to translate into all the world’s language eventually. For now, however, they’ll settle on these in the short term:

French

German

Indonesian

Italian

Japanese

Korean

Spanish

Hey, great idea, Twitter. I wonder if the “special badge” of honor will be enough to enlist talented, real help?